


like a velvet glove cast in iron

by luminaries



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-07
Updated: 2015-03-07
Packaged: 2018-03-16 20:08:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3501257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luminaries/pseuds/luminaries
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Welcome to fight club,” is the first thing Erwin says.</p><p>He is standing under the one light in the middle of the black concrete basement and he can see that light flickering back out of the dark in a hundred pairs of eyes.</p><p>The Fight Club AU. Levi is the narrator. Erwin is Tyler Durden.</p>
            </blockquote>





	like a velvet glove cast in iron

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is dedicated to [lupe-91](http://lupe-91.tumblr.com/), without whose encouragement, praise and huge amounts of patience this would have taken a whole year to finish. This strange story is not enough compensation.
> 
> Heavy trigger warnings for violence and dark themes: the main character suffers from metal health issues that sometimes edge into obscure suicidal ideation (I elaborate in the end notes some more about this, as it ties heavily into the plot), hints of parental abuse, hints of self-harm. Generally the same trigger warnings that apply to the book/film are found here. There is also casual ableism in some of the internal narration, Levi misgenders Hange in his internal narration before he finds out what's what and profanity.
> 
> The story is inspired more by the book, than the film. I wanted to see if I could write a pastiche between Fight Club, Natural Born Killers and Nick Cave songs, only rendered more optimistic about the human nature than these sources are.

“We really won’t die,” he says, a thousand neon lights reflected back shattered through his eyes. “You should know this by now.”

My spine is rubbing raw against the seat, my limbs are lead – of course I’m not tied down, of course, that would be easy. The gun scrapes past my teeth, pushes down on my tongue and it tastes the way metal smells. My protests are reduced to wet vowels sliding along the shine of the Glock.

He sighs and even that is devoid of emotion, pulls the gun out and steps back from where we were sharing the same breath. Of all the people I have known, he is all snakes.

I love him so much it hurts, this broken jaw of my desires. 

I blink and an entire world of fucked up possibilities opens up, as my father used to say. I could twist his wrist, grind my knee into his groin, crack my skull against his so hard we both see blood, five seconds. Three seconds and I’ll reach the door. One hour and I’ll have a car, wires tripped like he taught me. One day and I’ll be the most wanted man in America. 42 hours and the light turns in my eyes and I open my eyes in a bed in a motel and I find him waiting for me.

There’s no escaping Mr. Smith, I think fondly.

This is it. Ground zero. Our world is ending and he has never looked more beautiful.

Got anything else to say to mark the occasion, I ask instead. I wonder how clean the barrel of the gun is.

A smile opens up on his face like a wound, his fingers find the torn and stained material of my shirt, grip tight and pull me up. The bruised skin on my back pulses in time with my racing heart, as he leads us to the edge of the roof.

“All we have done up until now, every careful drop of glycerin in an acid ice bath, every 9-to-5 job you couldn’t stand, every bottle of pills, every single thing you’ve lost and gave up willingly, it all led us here. This point, now, forever. We will never grow old.”

The wind up here cuts across my face, my eyes. I look down over the edge at the bright single-cell organism of an emergency response team covering the street.

Life or death, close your eyes, pick one.

I feel like a monkey on a wire, suspended above 1000 feet of crisp clear dark air. Erwin casts no shadow as he waits for my answer, for the final kick. He is so warm to the touch when I fist my hands in the lapels of his coat it’s almost a comfort. 

I think of machine cogs, flesh stopping metal. If your life were an answer it might be permitted.

I know this because Erwin knows this.

I lean into him and I smell my own fear. It’s time for us to wake up, I hear myself saying. I would keep fighting for you with every polluted breath I have left, you know.

“It’s about to get exciting, won’t you stay till curtain fall?” The hand that cups my jaw is heavy, thumb resting at the corner of my mouth.

Shut up, love, I’ve figured it all out. Nails dig into my throat. I’ve never seen Erwin look apprehensive before.

That old saying, how you always kill the one you love, well, look, it works both ways.

Five minutes left until meltdown and I drag him with me over the edge of the building.

Wind whipping his hair, he screams. This is a day of many firsts. I try not to blink, not as we pass the thirteenth floor, not as I feel laughter choking past my lips. Start now and I won’t be able to stop.

The ground rushing up is flame-dark in his eyes; I laugh like a hyena, teeth bared.

The lower you fall, the higher you'll fly.

 

I’m standing on the copper rusted face of an industrial wasteland and I’m killing everything in sight.

Time stands still as I shoot and shoot and shoot.

It feels good. Skyscrapers like the zig-zag of lightning pierce the clouds. The desert that banks the carpool lane of some abandoned superhighway a thousand years into the future isn’t gold anymore. It’s heart-rich red, ground into fine particles underneath my boots.

It feels good in the way only killing feels good. I hear the markers of my odyssey through howls and raw animal sounds. It feels good even though killing never feels good. Most things in life that are one are also the other. It feels like it never quite ends because this revenge spree never ends, don’t have no fucking reason why it should.

The revolution is eternal, didn’t I tell you this already?

Stop pause rewind. You’re asking all the wrong questions.

 

I haven’t slept in four days. Sometimes I wish the alarm clock display would burn my retinas to a crisp just so I wouldn’t have to watch another 4AM slip by like a thief.

All my life I’ve been begging for some extra time. I dreamt of the day I’d have my own apartment, my own sofa, the kind with no lease on it, not the one you couldn’t even sneeze on without being cuffed over the ear for it. The apartment TV shows and dream home mags keep stuffing down your throat like it’s the standard.

Then I’d be free to kick my legs up and watch all the boring useless flicks I wanted to, start a new hobby, something Zen, the kind of crap my coworkers are crazy about, build something, go hiking, have a social life.

Thing is, when you have insomnia, you're never really asleep, and you're never really awake.

Everything is distant and unimportant. A copy of a copy of a copy.

I get up, go to work, come home, stare at the same tastefully decorated wall until I start feeling my own teeth rotting in my head, the world closing in at the corners.

I got what I wanted, I made something out of my life. The past wanted to eat me, I didn’t let it, and now my reward is nine whole hours of pure silence and the small sense of superiority people who survive the night and get to see the sun rising have over others.

I live for a few hours in my mind, a dull consciousness, but days pass in reality. I clean the apartment until every trace of individuality is wiped along with the grime and the sense that an actual human being lives there. I work out like a man possessed, hoping exhaustion will knock me right out. I even tried jogging around the neighborhood at two in the morning, despite every reflex and lived experience telling me this is a death sentence – a moot point in the cupcake part of city I moved into.

By the time fate had left me drooling on the couch like some horrorshow night of the living dead prop, reflexively pressing the buttons on the remote every minute or so, and I saw Cesare cheerfully swinging his corpse-legs over the edge of his coffin and narrowing his black hole bruised eyes at the camera, and realized he looks healthier than I do, I decided to see a doctor.

Bad call. Or rather, useless.

“I know your kind,” the doctor says. “Get by only on pre-packaged, reprocessed food, stay up a few nights, drink till you drop, and then wonder why your body refuses to behave. Insomnia is almost always a symptom of something else. Figure out what’s wrong with your life, fix that, and you’ll get better in no time.”

Look at my face, I say. D’you think I’m here for the nice conversation.

Just, I sigh. I run my fingers through my hair and I get the sudden absurd feeling of clumps of it falling out.

Can’t you give me something, doc? I mean, hospital-white Rozerem. I mean, skin-rose Zolpidem. _Anything_ , anything at all.

He said these won’t last forever. That I should go for a walk. Exercise. Chew this or that plant root.

I don’t need forever, I’ll take what I can get.

“Listen, son. You want to see real suffering? Go by west wing Tuesday night. See the addicts, the tumor patients, the brain parasites. Might put some things into perspective, who knows?”

I figure I’ve already exhausted my other night-out options so I go.

I wind up listening to so many break-your-heart stories I no longer have to pretend I’m too shy or too closed-off to talk. Eventually, _I_ start feeling like a parasite. I don’t cry, at first. It seems too personal, but I suppose realizing that every love, every relationship ends in death, that everyone leaves, frees you of any embarrassment you might feel.  


I wait for some catharsis but it never comes. I suppose there’s not much compassion I can muster for strangers when I don’t have any for myself either.

Then, just like magic, someone I don’t even remember seeing before sobs out a series of words at Wednesday support group and I realize I’m blinking out tears for the first time in eighteen years. It feels horrible, like I’m cracked open on the pavement for everyone to see and spit on and I don’t even know what hit me.

I walk home in a daze, pull the blanket up around me and sleep a whole night for the first time in six months.

Babies don’t sleep this well.

It feels like resurrection. Look up into the stars and you’re gone.

 

I open my eyes at Above and Beyond after half an hour of meditation and I realize I’m back at square one. Life’s like that, the skeleton woman leading this seminar would probably say, her bird’s bone hand digging into my shoulder in a supposedly reassuring gesture.

I very carefully opt not to look left where a column of smoke rises in a lazy stream.

Breathe. Relax. Hold your fire.

She is the itch of a scabbed over wound. I can feel her eyes picking me apart, revealing rib cage and bones and yellow fat.

“Does this help? How are you feeling right now?”

I look left against my better judgment.

Hange Zoe the hot-shot researcher.

Hange Zoe the madwoman.

Hange Zoe, who wouldn’t leave me the fuck alone.

I think about dousing us both in gasoline and setting us aflame. Would the smoke be thicker, blacker?

She writes with record speed in a pocket notebook. Observations. Ideas. I don’t know what breakthrough she wants to wring from the hands of the almost-dead. I tell myself I don’t care.

Wonder what she’s got there about me.

She holds my glare steadily, confidently. I swear I can almost see a twinkle behind the frame of her glasses. It feels like the convolutions of my brain are being analyzed.  
I hate that.

Get the hell gone, I want to say. I’m just a tourist, like you. This is my vacation. I let a small trickle of feeling pour through like I’ve been stuck with a needle, let myself hit rock bottom, and then I can wake up feeling less inhuman.

I don’t say this. Instead, I say, I need to focus, Hange. Go away.

She leans back, cigarette dangling precariously from her lips. I can feel her arrogance blowing smoke into my face.

 

I walk home, and spend four days rearranging my life like furniture before I return, eyes gouged out and dripping dark circles from lack of sleep.

 

I don’t understand how she keeps finding me but she always does. Hell, if anyone could do it, my money would be on Hange.

There’s forty of us packed together like sardines in a pathetically small amphitheater. I shut my eyes and retreat into the small permafrost centre of my mind, waiting for the world’s bicycle to pass me by.

There’s nothing around me except the vast timeless freezing Arctic tundra.

A wolf appears out of nowhere.

I walk towards it and the image shifts like a mirage, trembles, and now Hange is reclining on the snow, still smoking.

You’ve got to be kidding me, I think as she starts to talk, words as familiar as the pit of annoyance in my belly.

“What do you think is the most resilient parasite?”

You, the words ring out in my brain, you’re ruining my life. If I actually had a tumor I’d name it Hange.

It’s you, I say. Five whole bottles of pills couldn’t wipe the stain of you from my head.

“Wrong again,” she says and jams her pen in my neck before I’ve had time to blink.

 

People always ask me if I know Erwin Smith.

There's no reason why they shouldn't, because Erwin is the best. But that isn't why people are asking me.

What they want is inside knowledge. What you see is almost never what you get. 

I ask them if they think I can be bought that easily. I find their answers to be severely lacking.

Listen, mate, I say, voice starting to slur with the accent I’ve tried to beat out of it since I walked out of the meth-hazed trailer park that was my youth. I wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire and allergic to piss, but you sound like a reasonable fella. Give us your name and address and we’ll get right back to ya.

Bastard hung up. They always do, the cowards.

Erwin looks at me from underneath his lashes, fingers stilling their precise movements, the nuclear winter of his eyes piercing to the marrow.

He seems a very simple man and, in a sense, he is. Smart, the kind that twists and turns, that won’t sit still long enough for you to get a clean reading on. Dependable. Competent. Fills out a suit in all the right places, has a demeanor that screams trust me.

Go ahead, hand him the keys to your house. You won’t live to regret it.

Wrong.

This is not who he is. Erwin is so much more than that.

Erwin is knuckledusters made out of embossed golden rings. Erwin is velvet over Kevlar. Erwin is Greek Fire eating you from within and spitting out carbon.

He is whatever you deep down want him to be until he isn’t. Man can’t fight desire any more than he can fight fate, now, can he?

I look at him and I want to ask: what hardscrabble rock birthed you? What cliché piece of Americana spat you out, echoes of a hostile universe biting at your heels? – this ain’t no western, far as I can tell, but one glance at his thighs, however, and I can tell he’d look better on a horse than John Wayne ever did.

Who are you, skin wrapped tight around haunted factory floors and serrated ivory towers?

Erwin dreams of a burning world. He raises his arms towards it and it does not sear him.

Grass must be torn up if it is to grow. I know this because Erwin knows this.

I preferred silence. I listened to the hum of life in the loneliness of airports. I hid beneath my coat the scars of a life of a battle I had neither a name nor a stomach for.

(in this day and age nausea is a privilege)

Then Erwin came, on his train of blood a wind of anger, ripped open the window to let in the air and the thunder and the scream of the world.

I can only hope to borrow his fire, let it slip like thorns into my heart, my mind of many holes, his voice a home, his words a sermon.

Erwin is the most brilliant man I have ever met. I love him like I would a secret only I know, hidden between the floorboards and the wet concrete of a house now burnt clean of history.

So, I say, almost restrained, how’s that project of yours coming along?

His mouth twists into a smile that tells me a thousand things, not one of them good.

Scary motherfucker ain’t he, my love.

 

My job means I get to travel occasionally. Somehow I can’t be bothered to care.

I am a human shaped punching card for the airport control personnel.

You wake up at Logan.

You wake up at Willow Run.

You wake up at LaGuardia.

Rinse. Repeat.

Every takeoff and every landing I pray for a crash, an unseen vortex. Free-fall disintegration at 455 miles an hour. Something to wake me up or give me the shut-eye.  


I wake up on board of a plane, and this is how I meet Mr. Smith.

The sky outside the window reflecting back my eyes is a TV test pattern superimposed over a sunset.

In the seat next to mine a blond man appears to be sleeping. I try not to feel jealous and I fail. Then the plane hits an air pocket, the man shifts, ripples with the movement, notices me staring.

“I’m dead tired,” he says and I wonder if that’s aimed at me. The skin around his eyes crinkles like he finds all this terribly amusing, then adds, almost as an afterthought, “My name’s Erwin Smith.”

For a second claustrophobia pins me like a fly on a piece of paper, then it’s gone. I shake his hand. It’s surprisingly strong and dry. I’m Levi, I say, quiet.

I forget to imagine how loss of cabin pressure would suck all the oxygen out of my lungs. 

“So, what do you do for a living, Levi?” he asks, sounds catching on the edges of his teeth. I notice he’s still grasping my hand. I tug it free more forcefully than I should.

Hostile takeovers, I say, angry at myself for allowing shitty corporate humor to rub off on me. 

“You good at that?” His face is open, almost friendly, but the blinds are pulled all the way down. I could not read him if I knew how to.

I am. I am the best.

“How’s that working out for you,” he says, “being the best?”

I’m here, aren’t I?

He smiles. “Quite.”

“Now, if you’ll excuse me,” Erwin says as he gets up, straightening out imaginary wrinkles in his suit. “A question of etiquette. As I pass, do I give you the ass or the crotch?"

I don’t get the chance to voice my preference. There’s just a field of dark blue material filling up my vision as I try my best to melt into the seat, then he’s gone. He doesn’t return for the rest of the flight.

On the seat next to me, there’s a small business card. A name and a number.

I turn it around and there’s nothing written on the back.

I look at it until nothing after nothing comes wisping out from between cellulose threads.

 

The security task force guy is talking to me. His voice is a cassette playing and rewinding, playing and rewinding.

There’s nothing to worry about.

These things happen.

You’ll be reimbursed. Eventually.

It’s airplane policy.

You see, baggage handlers can ignore a ticking suitcase. Only Saturday morning cartoon bombs tick. A vibrating suitcase, on the other hand, well—

We have to call the police.

There’s nothing to worry about.

It’s probably nothing.

I abandon my suitcase in the hands of the police—loyalty only extends so far—and slide in the back of a cab as soon as I’m able. My policy is don’t stick around to answer questions. Especially questions involving bombs. 

 

The cab stops in the parking lot next to my apartment building.

“Holy shit,” the driver says, almost climbing halfway out the car window to get a better look.

I notice my condo is now a smoldering crater in the side of the building. All that IKEA craftsmanship has moved on to a better place and left me behind.  
Ask me about bad luck.

“This where you call home, son?” he asks me, almost laughing, and I can just imagine him telling this story to his buddies until they never want to see him again.

Not anymore, I say, as I mechanically take my wallet out and count the bills.

My policy still stands.

 

I cross the street to a payphone I see on the other side. Cell still works, but, well, it’s hard to shake old habits.

Old ghosts.

I pick up the receiver and I realize there’s no one left I could call, that could help me.

The sound of the dial tone is loneliness, is emptiness, is anger in bloom.

Suddenly I remember the little white card. The thought seems pathetic. What would a man I just met want to do with the FBI bomb-squading my suitcase on a vacated runway back at Dulles or my newly achieved homelessness?

Then again, I do have to call someone and this seems as good a shot as any. I punch in the digits and the phone rings and rings and no one answers.

As soon as I hang up, the payphone rings.

Strange. I never knew they could take outside calls.

Hello? I say.

“Yes, who is this?” Erwin says, voice tinted with caution.

It’s the guy into hostile takeovers, I say, from the plane. You, uh, didn’t pick up the phone when I first called you.

“I never pick up the phone,” he says, in a way that suggests this should be common knowledge.

Right, well, I wish I didn’t have to bother you like this, but I think I may need your help, just, anything you’d be willing to do. You know how they warn you about being up shit creek without a paddle, well this is more like being up shit creek without a _boat_ , I… I don’t even know what job you have, the card was blank—

“The people who call me, they know what I’m good for,” he says, telling me nothing about anything, “Why don’t you start from the top and we’ll figure it out as we go.”

I sigh, try to clear the fog. There was this thing with my luggage, I say, and I realize I can barely make out the charred remains of my sofa lying in a fountain where it fell burning from fifteen stories.

I tell him everything and he laughs, the sound of it taking the edge off somewhat, doesn’t make the blood in my veins come rushing or my nails dig deep until my palms bear the marks for days to come.

When the phone clicks dull in its place, I have the name of a bar I vaguely know scrawled onto the card, and if I said I didn’t feel comfortable with that sort of firegazing, I’d be lying, but—

— _but_ , there’s wandering aimlessly, and then there’s having a plan, and sometimes just the skeleton of one is enough.

 

The place is dark and my eyes are stinging from smoke and lights and tiredness, still, at least Erwin’s buying – _I picked this one because I know a guy who knows a guy, you know how that goes_ , he says and I can tell it’s to fill the empty space between us.

He talks a lot for a man who says very little.

“So, Rome burnt down in a single day,” he offers tentatively.

Along with my tables and shelving unit, rugs and floor-to-ceiling windows, refrigerator filled with twenty kinds of condiments but no actual food and whatever material receipt I had that I’d ‘made it’.

Because, y’see, you start off wanting to show the world what you can do and there’s that gun to your head pushing you on and on, over corpses and on your knees. Positive stress, right? But then you find you can’t stop moving. And you start thinking. What if they’re just fucking with you? What if they look me in the eyes one day, tell me _son, it’s been a laugh, but now you gotta go where you gotta go, and that’s back in the hole you crawled out of_.

It’s not about the apartment, I say. That’s just filler for my nesting instinct. It’s about the past I got hidden in my floor and in the walls. It’s about the things you cannot let go of because they made you as well as _you_ made _them_ , because the past is yours to strangle, yours to hide in the trunk, yours to drown in the river, yours to wash out from the grooves of your fingerprints.

I don’t know why I’m spilling like I’m run through with needles but here you are. I tell him about all the keepsakes I hid out of necessity, because fuck it, the cops could never piece it together, not anymore.

“Well then,” Erwin says, unbothered, a charcoal sketch enigma, small smile caught in the corner of his mouth like a fishhook. “It ends where it begins.”

It’s too hot in the room and my hair will smell like cancer-red Marlboros and asphyxia-blue Gauloises for this night and the next. 

When he crosses his legs beneath the table the slow heated press of his thigh against mine reminds me of whisky burn. Soon, I’ll learn this is part of his veil dance. 

He confronts me with everything I want and can never have.

“Think of it this way,” he says, hands laid palm up on the table, an offering. “This is your deliverance.”

“You’ve been delivered from Swedish furniture,” says Erwin.

“You’ve been delivered from clever art,” says Erwin.

“You’ve been delivered from the skeleton that burned down along with the closet it was in, that could get you ten years,” says Erwin.

For all that blood climbs the cracks between my teeth more easily than a smile, its effort is impressive.

“You could just ask me, you know,” he says, tone softly deceptive.

Panic floods my chest, all brass and grit and black road-tar. If he read it on me in this light and on this kind of evening, it makes me hate the feel of it even more.

Ask you what, I say, tone matching tone like sparrows in flight.

He sighs exasperatedly. “You called _me_ for a reason, and that reason is most certainly not talkin’ about illegals like the weather. Like there’s an answer in there somewhere, if you were looking for it. _You_ ,” he says, pointing at me, my heart (bullet in mid-air), “need a place to stay. Mine is up for auction. Just ask.”

Something in the back of my head whispers that this is a bad idea. Not that it’s ever stopped me before.

I rise to his level of madness.

Can I stay at your place, I say.

“Yes,” he says curtly. “One condition.”

What’s that?

“You follow me out behind the building. I have a favour to ask of you.”

What you see is almost never what you get.

 

Out back there’s dumpsters and wet pavement and a xylophone-ribbed dog looking at us like we’re something interesting.

“I want you to hit me as hard as you can,” Erwin says, without menace, without ill will.

I think of gentrification and accommodation, the cowardice of watching people suffer from a distance for comfort.

My confusion doesn’t come from not speaking the language of violence, but from not understanding why anyone would ask for it. There is a wall I see growing between our lived experiences. 

Watch my anger growing out of that wall.

A siren wails in the distance and I realize now that what he wants is what I want too, the match asking for a strip to be struck against.

Erwin is waiting, all eyes and hard angles, as unpredictable as a fight on the street, as the first spatter of blood on a snow-white shirt.

I lunge, fist colliding with his abdomen, controlled pandemonium, and he gasps, surprised and pain-filled.

Your ideas aren’t half-bad, I see, comes out of my mouth, before he grabs my arm, twists it.

“Brings back memories, doesn’t it?” Erwin smiles, if you could call that a smile. It might fit the dictionary definition, if you had never seen a human smile before.

Thing is, in bar brawls the outcome is never certain. Anything goes. His punches fit perfectly in all my soft spots, the ones you know where they are because you’ve been kicked in them a thousand times over.

The vicious uppercut I deliver makes a sound, bone knocking on bone, something as natural as the smoking of a gun and the clink of ice in a glass.

I want this to last forever, or until the marrow dries from my bones.

 

When we’re done punching the feeling out of our bodies we lean with our backs to the wall and share a bottle of beer and a cigarette. 

“Give me a light,” Erwin says, toeing the line between order and question. I do, and when I lean forward our fingers brush long enough for the flame to come much too close to the hair that now hangs in his eyes.

We should do this again sometime, I say, pulse singing like it wants to leap out of me.

I’m thinking of the Rorschach blot pattern of bruises on his skin, the loosened collar offering only a hint.

"If you could fight anyone," says Erwin, "who would you fight?"

My father, I say unthinkingly, before I realize it’s the truth.

There’s words for children who kill their parents, but that’s not the path for me to take. In this story suddenly gone Old Testament, the father gets saddled with a son sure enough recognizably going to kill him one day, hates him for it, strikes first, like the snake he is.

Fate doesn’t care about the road, only the end, which is always the same. It is big enough to contain multitudes.

What about you, I say.

“Me? Oh no, I’m more of a lover than a fighter actually,” he says, the wind carrying away the smoke from his lips, and the lies, and the construct – polished automaton.  
I never believed him, not even then when we’d first met, before I learned that knives were how he and people’s backs should intersect.

The hum of my mind is quiet once more as we walk to his car, worries unfurling like tomorrow has been cancelled. His hands are steady as he grips the steering wheel, but I still think of drunk driving TV ads and posters – _murder climbs in the driver seat of your Cadillac!_ – the looming white of the streetlamps ramming against my chest like blows.

The pavement races past, gleaming in the city’s humidity, and gradually the buildings fall away to the rougher terrain of the city's edge.

Colors bleed out until all that is left is black and blue and I feel like I’m falling forward into the distance.

 

We leave the car in an empty plot of land. I don’t ask why and he never explains. 

Here the roads are deserted, the urgent demand of highways spoken only in humming wires and the industrial tick of this despoiled shore.

When we get to Erwin’s my face falls.

The building I refuse to call a house has boarded up windows and a white picket fence that’s seen better days and the word CONDEMNED in block red letters that ring out like they would in a courtroom.

You must be shitting me, right, I say.

What the hell is this, the Amityville horror, I say.

Erwin pushes lightly at the front door and it creaks open, the weak light from outside yawning across the hardwood floor.

“Don’t worry, I’m sure you and all the demons in this place will get along just fine,” he says, and walks all confident like inside.

I think about calling a cab. The other part of me thinks about stealing his car keys and driving out of here tires screeching. I smother that part before it smothers me and walk forward in Erwin’s steps.

He flicks the lights on. They don’t work for more than two hours at a time and not at all when it’s raining and it floods the woodwork and the nails rust and inch out and the wallpaper peels and water runs down the single lightbulb in a hanging socket in the kitchen.

Erwin says he’s been living here for almost a year.

The building is louche, the way you’d expect it to be.

There’s a closet specially made to keep damask tablecloths from creasing. Another closet for storing furs, refrigerated. Handpainted tiles in the bathroom depicting a peaceful woodland lake, fancier than my grandmother’s prized china.

The ‘house’ is also rotten, dusty, waiting for its death, the landscape after the atom bomb scare drops. The plumbing clogs, cracks, doesn’t work. Walking up the stairs requires a keen sense of balance to keep from collapsing with them all the way down to the basement.

I don’t know if Erwin owns this building or if he’s just squatting.

Neither option would surprise me, not really.

But it surprises you, don’t it?

The house, like everything he owns and does is an exercise in misdirection.

“Stay,” he says, then, “make yourself at home.”

I get my pick of the building’s four dormitories. 

I could walk out at any moment, leave this place behind. None of the doors lock anyway from all the times police kicked them in.

I think of all the slaughtered nights I spent, wondering. Blunt nights, until the light caught in his folds, until he looked up and they sharpened into the shape of him.

The cobwebbed chandelier, crystals torn off and scattered, glittered in the gloom like a mouthful of gold teeth. The shadows under his jawbone are pale violet, but not under his eyes.

Most people wouldn’t look this beautiful this late, this starkly lit; most people wear out. Not him.

He is in the corner. He is shining.

A pause at the threshold. An instinctive inward twitch of what lies beneath my face, and then acquiescence. He lets me in, or I him.

This will matter, in time.

 

There is nothing for half a mile in every direction except warehouses, an abandoned gas station and the waterfront. When night comes the world outside the house is a void. A dark mirror.

Nothing in the house except for Mr. Smith’s suits and files and countless books lining the walls of the basement, pages stained.

The bed I chose for the night was covered with a tarp and looked clean, but my skin still prickled and itched as I lay down, as quiet as a skeleton. I think of bedbugs, how they once came like specks of cinnamon, little bits of dried blood, one hundred marks upon the sheet.

Tomorrow I will boil them, soak them in Clorox, clear off all the webbing in the bed, the ultimate recoil.

Tonight, I fall asleep in seconds and don’t wake up until morning light prickles my eyelids.

 

I call in at work. Explain my situation.

My boss is a kind boss; he gives me three days until I have to go back.

When I hang up Erwin is looking at me from where he sits tapping away at his laptop, the table it’s resting on crisscrossed with large gashes, and I say, where do you keep your cleaning supplies?

“What cleaning supplies?” Erwin says, like I asked, “Where do you keep your space rocket?”

I end up wiping down all surfaces in the rooms we use with only rags and water. I make a bad job of it and it leaves me more frustrated than when I started. The house is fucking huge, with three stories and some chambers I could store all my family in comfortably. If you could get them all in the same place that is.

Erwin has to teach me how to do basic stuff all over again.

How to flush the toilet when there’s no water.

How to operate the gas stove without us asphyxiating in our sleep.

How to stop worrying about structural integrity and trust in the ceiling to settle without collapsing.

Most of the time it’s us against the house’s will to live — a daily battleground. It doesn’t have a will to live, which makes things tricky.

In the evening we go back to the bar.

We tiptoe around conversation when all we want is to fight, again and again.

This time other men stop and look.

It is only, as Erwin tells me, when I’m pressing my weight down on his shoulders and my forearm into his neck, gasping wetly against the side of my face, a matter of time.

 

The next day I go into the city to buy new clothes with the money from a savings account.

There’s something about hoarding.

Cash. Furniture. Ephemera.

This is what we use to fill up our lives.

Coins trickle softly down the slot. The only other sound in the Laundromat is the whir of the machines.

Paradise of the bacteria. I set the temperature and the rotation somewhere around the high end of ‘too much’.

Oh, my mind is big on cleanliness. If it’d shut up about cleanliness for two seconds flat, maybe I wouldn’t be dreaming of blood and muck every night. And not confined with geometric precision in one yellow taped crime scene, either.

Blood on the walls. On the table the bed the photographs the chair the floor.

Behind my eyes, beating like a headache: I can see it now in the one mirror in this place, they’re becoming a little more bloodshot every day.

Surrounded by the halo of a bruise. This is new.

I should sleep more, I say to my reflection.

And tell Mr. Smith to avoid my face next time, I don’t add. I need it to be presentable.

The words echo off the glass.

Come back female apparently.

“You should sleep more.”

Oh, it’s her. I turn, sighing exasperatedly.

Did you follow me?

“It’s true, yes, I did. I was worried about you. Haven’t seen you at any support groups in the past three weeks. Happened to see you walking in and, well,” Hange Zoe says in that disarming way she has. “Sorry if I’m bothering you or anything.”

She sounds so genuine I mellow out instantly.

Reluctantly.

Well, I’m currently technically homeless, since my apartment blew itself to bits, I say, hoping that honesty is the best distraction. I don’t mention my avoiding the authorities, or later snapping my sim card in two.

“I’m so sorry about that,” she says, worry creasing her brow, “do you… have a place to stay?”

I’m alright. I’m staying at someone’s house for the moment.

“Good to know you’re safe. You’re a lucky fella, ain’t you?” she says, snorting. It’s not exactly graceful.

Lady, with the kind of luck I’ve been having I’m liable to die from someone else’s game of Russian roulette, I say, amusement tugging the corners of my lips.  
She laughs. It’s not exactly unpleasant.

“Oh, God, that’s kind of terrible, actually,” says Hange, leaning against one of the washing machines, then seriously, “Don’t call me _lady_ , though. I’m not… strictly speaking a woman.”

Ah, I manage to say, feeling like an asshole.

“I know you don’t _really_ have any sort of terminal illness or crippling addiction,” they say, leaning in conspiratorially. “But I hope those sessions helped you out, even if it was just a little.”

Hange digs around in their bag and I half expect them to pull out something impossible, like Mary Poppins would.

What they present me with is a card with a number, an email address and their name.

“If you ever need anything,” says Hange, their brown eyes narrowed, bright and clear behind their glasses, “don’t hesitate to contact me.”

“That said, you’re an interesting person. I’d like to ask you a few more questions later after you’ve got everything back in order, if that’s okay with you. Now if you’ll excuse me, duty calls,” they say, waving a thick notebook in front of me, the one I recognize from therapy, before running off as fast as they appeared.

I stand there almost stunned. Never thought anyone would consider me interesting after a 5 minute conversation.

Especially Hange Zoe. Who I would talk to of my own volition.

There must have been something in that detergent.

 

Every Wednesday night I die and every Wednesday night I am reborn.

More and more men gather in the empty parking lot, cheering us on, howling their encouragement.

More and more often they join in. The blood stains on the pavement start to overlap and mix.

I walk with Erwin home ( _our_ home) and I feel lighter than I have in years.

I don’t miss my apartment.

I don’t miss TV.

There’s no room in my life for anything but this.

I love it as gasoline loves the flame.

I love it the way my mother loved the smell gunpowder left in its wake.

I should be looking for a new apartment.

I should be upset my life is not following its preordained course.

But I’m not.

 

At work there’s Walter, from Microsoft.

He has straight white perfect teeth, a fashionable haircut and a straight white perfect life.

The job you dream of telling your highschool friends about someday.

I take one long look at him and I can tell he’s never went hungry a single day in his life. Or gotten into a fight that’s about more than marking your parking space territory. No scars. Not a single claim to life.

Here he’s looking at me, half my face clean shaven, other half bruised and ugly and swollen.

I’m thinking of painting myself a new grimace with the torrent of blood in my cheek and lips.

He’s probably thinking about the meatless, painfree potluck he went to last weekend or the ozone or the Earth's desperate need to stop cruel product testing on animals.

But probably he’s not.

My boss turns to me, says there are fewer and fewer gentlemen in business and more thugs, thinking I’ll laugh with him.

I don’t.

But I smile at him, and I’m wearing Erwin’s smile, the one that reflects the light and bounces it back red.

“Jesus,” says Walter, “I’d hate to see what happened to the other guy.”

Yes, Walter. You really would. 

 

Most of the week we’re a pantomime of normalcy.

For me it’s business as usual. For Erwin it’s another day of scrounging up dirt on whatever hapless soul the powers that be pointed their divine finger at.

Businessmen. Politicians. Millionaires.

Every day it’s rich idiot hunting season.

Erwin says he got the career idea after making a puffed up backbencher cry at a rally.

So far he has about five Big Fat Fucking Folders Full of Filth and Pathetically Disturbing Attempts of Sludges to come over as Some Sort of Fully Functioning Human Beings.

He then takes the information and sells it to the highest bidder, which in most cases is rich tragedy’s personal assistants.

He tells them what they want to hear. No more, no less.

What he learned from their own computers.

He finds people’s dirty laundry and sells it back to them.

It’s genius.

It’s Erwin.

He couldn't be anything else if he tried.

On one of these days, we’re sitting in the living room, me with a torch and reading the magazines we found shoved into every cupboard Erwin’s not using to store God knows what.

The previous occupant was a bit of a shut in.

Some of the pages are missing. Erwin says it’s because another tenant used to fold them for cocaine envelopes.

Check this weird shit out, I say. “I am Jack’s heart.” It’s written in the first person.

Without me, Jack’s organs could not receive the nutrition they need to survive.

There’s a whole series, I say.

I am Jack’s prostate, I say.

“I provide Jack with great pleasure when he’s fucked by guys he won’t acknowledge in public,” says Erwin.

I nearly choke on my tongue.

What’s that you got there, I say.

“Soldier of fortune,” he says. “There’s an ad here about selling outdoor tactical gear.”

You want to sneak around the city in desert camo? Go all Captain America on our asses, I say, raising an eyebrow. 

“Did you ever wonder, why this obsession? Why this enduring attraction of war? Why those mad, sad fuckers behind the bar would step on each other for a chance to fight?” Erwin says, smoke drifting from his mouth like a flag.

I shrug. I was never good at articulating things and I was even less good at picking parts out of myself and studying them. 

I was born with it, I guess. The violence. 

And my city is beautiful, almost and always, in the 2 am light, when you look out through murder. It’s a little hard to stay interested in the how’s and the why’s.

“It gives you what you long for the most,” he says, and I haven’t noticed how close he is until he’s breathing in my air. It would be irrational to believe that I can sense the deficit, the oxygen he takes for himself, but that doesn’t stop my lungs from constricting the minute he’s near.

“A purpose, a meaning, a reason for living, even with its destruction and carnage. When you are there, in the midst of conflict, it hits you. The shallowness and vapidness of our lives,” Erwin says.

“And war is an enticing elixir. It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows you to be noble. For all those with the least meaning in their lives – the disenfranchised, the poor whiskey-tango bastards, even the lost legions of youth that live in the splendid indolence and safety of the industrialized world – they’re all susceptible to war’s appeal,” Erwin says.

“In the beginning it looks and feels like love. And war loves you back. But not in a way you can understand. It loves you so much it forces you to swallow this life whole, thorns an’ all, and let it grow inside you like a parasite. Until it eats your insides alive and stares out of your eyes and tells you what to do,” Erwin says, sunspeared eyes shining.

 

In the dripping bowels of the bar, every Wednesday, at closing time, something was happening.

It was on the tip of everyone’s tongue.

We just gave it a name.

With Erwin’s imagination?

You can guess what he called it.

 

“Welcome to fight club,” is the first thing Erwin says.

He is standing under the one light in the middle of the black concrete basement and he can see that light flickering back out of the dark in a hundred pairs of eyes.

Every week we start with Erwin giving the rules that we decided.

"The first rule of fight club is - you do not talk about fight club," says Erwin.

The room is so silent the heartbeats of the guys next to me sound like a pair of black crickets.

“The second rule of fight club is,” and here Erwin smirks, “ _you do not talk about fight club_.”

The men laugh and Erwin quiets them with one hand.

No one listens to anyone like they listen to Mr. Smith.

Watching him do it is eerie, almost, a magician at work.

A general addressing his troops.

A preacher leading his flock.

"The third rule of fight club is - when someone says "stop" or goes limp, the fight is over," says Erwin, coldly serious.

This is not a place of slaughter.

If life becomes too long for you, or your throat too tight for your screams, you walk away.

"Fourth rule is - only two guys to a fight," says Erwin.

"Fifth rule - one fight at a time," says Erwin.

"Sixth rule - no shirts, no shoes," says Erwin.

I smirk at that one.

"Seventh rule - fights go on as long as they have to," says Erwin.

"And the eighth and final rule," says Erwin, arms spread wide, a satanic Messiah, "if this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight."

Nothing is solved after these fights. But that doesn’t matter.

Erwin walks forward into the crowd and it parts before him like the Red Sea.

When he passes me he winks.

 

I’m sitting in a café – not my first choice, but Erwin says he needs fresh air. Before me there are four coffee cups. Two and two.

The light stings a little.

Erwin is wearing sunglasses that do nothing to hide his broken nose.

On the front page of the newspaper he’s reading the stars on the set are rotting in competition.

The set is a monument. It depicts a man who made history, a hundred times enlarged.

The petrifaction of a hope.

Who you are in fight club is not who you are in the rest of the world.

When the waiter comes to take away the cups I notice his bruise blotched hand. Then his sutured brow.

When our eyes meet there is a spark, gone as soon as it came.

Fight club only exists in the hours between when fight club starts and fight club ends.

When Erwin wraps his jacket tighter around his waist, I can see the broken fingers of his right hand; not anywhere near healed even two weeks after it happened.

My own aches pulse timidly in sympathy.

I suppose I have to believe him when he tells me of a future in which there is room for me to live. And more besides.

I am tiny, reflected in his bright, watchful eyes, but he sees something more.

Sometimes I wish the future he promises didn’t make my pulse jump simply because it’s him doing the promising.

 

After fight club, everything else in your life gets the volume turned down. You can deal with anything.

At work I am a Zen master. The little things that added and added until they made me want to turn people to stone with a loving Medusa’s gaze no longer matter.

Occasionally (meaning once every two weeks or so) I write an email to Hange. I don’t tell them about Erwin or fight club. Just that everything is all better, don’t you let worry sprout. Bad for the health, that is.

Right now, Walter’s sitting in my office probably feeling a bit anxious at the sorry state I’m in.

Sorry, Thick White Duke, but not all of us can walk out of the emergency room whistling every week.

"Have you finished those reports?" says Walter.

Yes, I say, and when I stand up smoothly to get them for him he flinches so hard the chair screeches across the floor.

The building is new age incarnate, smooth efficiency, made of glass and metal, all things sharp.

I’m picturing Walter, uncoordinated, flatline spirited Walter. He stumbles, he trips, so many sharp edges, and then, so much blood.

It is easy to picture and I picture it often. Without menace and without ill will.

When I sweep my tongue over my teeth I find that I can wiggle more than a few of them.

 

It’s Wednesday night.

The men are all shouting in tongues as if possessed.

Some church this is.

A skinny kid slams an older guy’s head on the floor and I whistle.

Erwin says, "Fucker, that man is out cold. It's over."

I look at his body; corded muscle. His pants slide down low on his hips and my eyes follow the trail of his hair.

I look at the bruises on his chest and think of the bite marks I long to leave on his neck, on his hips, on his thighs.

Fight club isn't about winning or losing.

Fighting is about making someone else’s world contract as you expand your own. That’s just how things are.

It’s my turn.

I can become feral with surprising ease.

We’re struggling on the ground; my thumbs are poised over my adversary’s eyes before he punches me in the torso so hard I taste bile.

Sometimes fighting is not about winning. Sometimes it’s worth letting others gain the upper hand.

He slams my head off the floor over and over again.

I don’t want to say stop.

It’s Erwin that pulls the man off me, then lifts me up as well.

We look down and there’s a print of half my face in blood on the floor, the big O of my mouth and the little slit of my eye clearly defined.

“Screwby,” Erwin says and I can tell he’s vaguely impressed.

I shake my opponent’s hand but the room is spinning like an atomic gyroscope, which makes things difficult.

"How about next week?" my opponent says.

Look at me, I say, how about next month?

Erwin carries me out to the car we’ve parked outside.

As we drive off, the world is content and drifting in and out of focus.

 

In the emergency room I’m dripping like an oversoaked rag.

Erwin takes it upon himself to communicate for me.

“He fell down some stairs,” says Erwin, flatly.

He is a brilliant liar. His pulse never climbs above 80 bpm, mostly because he can tell it doesn’t really matter.

The nurse ignores him in favor of patching my wreckage up.

I fell down some stairs, I slur pathetically. I mostly look like a semi-truck was playing footsie with me.

The nurse says nothing.

We’re both a duo of liars, she can tell.

 

When Hange calls, Mr. Smith’s careful fingers are tending to my split lower lip, disinfecting, probing at the gash, bandaging. My tongue darts out to taste blood, Rivanol, and beneath it, his skin.

I am Jack’s cold sweat.

When they ask me how I’m faring, I can only manage small sounds of agreement, but that seems to be enough.

 

At home, Erwin is marinating in the tub, reclining languid, one leg artfully thrown over the edge. When I tell him I always knew he had a little spoiled brat in him, he scoffs.

He can never quite seem to fit anywhere unless he’s somehow close enough to touch me.

Fight club becomes the reason to cut your hair short and trim your fingernails.

This is what I’m doing now, body numb from the painkillers. The sink is cool beneath my fingertips, grounding.

I couldn’t even find you _regret_ on a map.

“Your last one was sloppy,” says Erwin, carefully pitched.

Fuck you, I say, eyes staring decidedly in the mirror and not at him— _Jesus_ — and mind in the gutter, right where we both belong. That guy was fuckin’ huge and you know it. I can’t stand on my tip toes and punch him in the neck you know.

He has that look in his eyes, I can tell. It no longer stings my skin like the afterthought of cigarette burns.

I know what it means. But it’s been so long and I’m so tired.

My thoughts are lesions in my brain. My brain is a scar.

Not for the first time I wish I was a machine.

“Where d’you reckon your father is right now?” He doesn’t say it to change the subject. This is him taking his time before he sinks his teeth in.

I don’t know and I don’t give a fuck. Probably remarried; it’s been over twenty years, I say, voice turned into something keen and cold. I’m the only one in my family to ever finish college, I’ve done my duty dusting off rungs on a step ladder that could collapse at any moment.

“Setting up franchises now, is he,” Erwin says, and yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s worth at least a not-quite-smile from me, _but_ –

“It’s not only me who sees—” he starts, the hundred thousand dollar sentence; blood rack, barbed wire.

Spare me, I bite off, voice shot to ribbons. In seconds his hand on my neck is hard, pressing at the base of my skull, a reminder. Mr. Smith has always been deceptively fast.

“No one is spared.” His voice is distant and soft above me. “But Levi, you could be glorious enough to save.” 

When he lets go I shiver.

I can’t find it in myself to argue with him at this point.

I reach into my mouth and yank.

I stare at the tooth in my hand. I am not sure what to feel. What is one _supposed_ to feel in this situation?

“Corrupted by time,” Erwin says, from the door, “even the Venus de Milo is falling apart.”

The tooth clinks down the drain, forgotten.

 

Four months after I moved in with Erwin in a house on Paper Street someone knocks at the door.

This never happens.

I reach out for a knife that isn’t there before I remember where I am.

The knocking becomes more insistent.

I figure my face is enough to scare anyone into leaving so I open the door and hear, “Jesus _Christ_ ,” at the same time I say, what the _fuck_.

Hange Zoe is standing in front of me, face flickering six emotions at once – _surprised-unsure-furious-doubtful-frightened-neutral_ — writ so large even I can read them.

“Levi,” they start, pause, look defeated, “you’re—”

This is not a conversation I want to have right now, I say.

It’s the first time I feel self-conscious about my bruises and wounds. I don’t like this.

“That guy you live with,” they say, voice low so only I can hear them, “is he here now?”

No, I say. 

Erwin’s been gone all morning, said he had a few errands to run in the city.

“Did he do this to you?” they say, coldly serious.

No, I say, too quickly by the looks of it, then more forcefully, no. I would never let anyone do that to me. This is something else.

Something pure.

It is true. Life labors viciously in defense of itself and I am no exception. Still, there is a flawed place in the fabric of my heart that tells me where danger is and beckons me towards it.

Self-destruction may be self-improvement but it doesn’t mean that I would let anyone place their boot upon my throat and _press_.

Hange doesn’t seem convinced, looking like their own canary down the mineshaft, skin prickling with the sense that something is horribly wrong.

Can I get you something to drink, I say, the light frozen through the windows; Hange a statue and me not looking at them.

“Water,” they say, after a slow deliberation. They know not to press, even if they want to know more, so stage exit left for me it is.

In the kitchen, I run my fingers through my hair, exhale exhaust. The oven smoking in peaceless October looks singularly tempting.

I need to get them to leave. I need to get them to forget about me. I need to run as far as the transcontinental railway can take me.

When I emerge back into the hall Hange is nowhere to be seen.

I am Jack’s raging bile duct.

There’s a soft sound of voices coming from the other side of the house, and when I slink closer I realize Erwin and Hange are talking.

He must have arrived while I was off pretending to be hospitable.

The thought is a startling and upsetting one; not in a thousand years I could have conceived of them interacting, like it’s a cosmic event only I am a witness to.

Some part of me feels cast aside as well as relieved. There’s no telling what cerberus of calculations and probabilities would emerge from this, and I hope Erwin has enough sense to derail this freight train.

For the rest of the day I feel like I’m sleepwalking in a fever dream, trying to get out of the undergrowth of neurasthenia which slowly, soundlessly grows around me.

Their voices are starting to rise. It sounds like they’re arguing; about me? What unusually cruel nostalgia.

They’ve been politely shouting at one another for 45 minutes when the phone rings.

Looks like I’m mister popularity today. 

Except no one outside the three of us should have this number.

I answer it anyway.

The one calling, says he’s a detective.

He says he’s working for the local police force.

He says there is evidence that the bomb that torched my apartment was homemade.

He advises me not to leave town.

The man you’re looking for, I say, he doesn’t live here anymore. And he didn’t leave a forwarding address.

I hang up the phone and rip the line out of the wall.

I get out Erwin’s laptop.

I’ve almost figured this out when Erwin comes knifing around the corner from the other room.

He moves up behind me soundlessly, eliciting not even one creak from the floorboards. I’ve always marveled, distantly, at the way he skirts the laws of physics like they’re simply asinine suggestions.

“What are you reading?” he says suddenly, and I start, not sure how to explain the bomb-making recipes on the screen, then just as abruptly, “I need you to get your friend to leave. This is a liability.”

Why me? You’re the one that’s been talking with them till now, I say, annoyed.

“Don’t mention me,” Erwin says, flat.

I turn around and he’s already fucked off to somewhere else. Hange is standing in his place.

Staring at me like I just took a dump in the middle of the living room.

Like I’m the one who’s off his rocker. 

I’m still not sure what I did to deserve this.

I think it’s time for you to leave, I say.

“If you think that’s best,” they say. I have no clue what that’s supposed to mean. “Please call me later. I’m here, I can listen—”

I say, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

When the door shuts behind Hange, Erwin comes out of the woodwork.

“Good job,” he says. “You can stop going back to your office, too. We have everything we need now and I know how much you hate that place.”

He lights a cigarette. The light briefly flares in the dark room.

It lights the forgotten laptop. 

It lights the abandoned glass of water.

It lights my snarl.

Erwin, I say, it appears my apartment was destroyed by a homemade bomb.

“Interesting,” he says, conveying his absolute lack of interest.

The dots don’t add up, I say. If someone wanted me dead they could at least have made sure I was in the state at that time.

“It could be worse,” Erwin says, “you could be cursed with the three terrible Karmas. You could be beautiful, rich and famous."

Fuck you, okay, I say, do you have to be such a shit? I loved that apartment, I built my whole life in that place.

Erwin’s eyebrow goes crawling up his face. He is momentarily stunned. It’s not very often I can get one over on him.

I’d like to thank the Academy, I say.

Erwin grins and runs his fingers through the hair on the back of my neck. It’s a surprisingly comforting gesture.

I’m as nasty as nasty gets but four months later and I still haven’t learned to smile like that, as obscure as the black lines crossing names and places on a government file, and the pages, I am sure, of the yet-to-be-written police report on my brutal murder.

 

I’m standing on the roof of our car in the middle of that empty field looking up at the sky masked with clouds of an unknown construction.

I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens.

Erwin is building, always working on a project, always thinking.

When I blink myself awake in the dark, he does the same. I know that he is waking up right that second because I am. Instantly awake and thinking, like there’s something in him that never sleeps at all.

Right now he’s hauling logs, some as tall as his eyes, placing them in a semicircle at an angle of his own calculation. There is a line drawn in the dirt that he keeps coming back to, some unknown parameter for this strange architecture.

 _This is a dream, isn’t it_ , I say.

 _Yes_ , says Erwin, _but that doesn't mean that it isn't real. At least, I don't think it does._

Erwin sounds uncertain. I have never heard him sound uncertain before.

If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?

 _What time is it?_ he asks.

I always wear a watch.

I asked, _where?_

 _Right here_ , Erwin says, _right now._

It’s 4.06 pm.

 _What do you see up there_ , he asks, _looking at that dying sun?_

I smile at him, a whole one that I know would break his heart, and say, _I see angels. They're coming down for us from heaven. And I see you riding a big red horse, and you're driving the horses, whipping them, and they're spitting and frothing all along the mouth, and they're coming right at us. And I see the future, and there's no death, because you and I, we're angels..._

He takes my hand, helps me down and says, _The whole world's coming to an end, Levi._

Sometimes, you wake up and have to ask where you are.

The sky is flame dark now and rising anger but I have to ask what was it that he built.

Erwin shrugged and showed me how the five standing logs were wider at the base. Erwin showed me the line he'd drawn in the sand, and how he'd use the line to gauge the shadow cast by each log.

What he’d created was the shadow of a giant hand, gone now in the dimming light. At exactly 4.10 pm the hand was perfect, and for one perfect minute Erwin had sat in the palm of a perfection he'd created himself.

One minute was enough, Erwin said, a person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.

Erwin, with the killer’s hands that were made to play the violin.

Erwin, the vicious light of my life.

I squeeze his hand until the bones crack beneath my sinuous fingers, his own twisting a burning bracelet into the skin of my wrist, and I thought I had never felt such glorious agony.

I looked into his eyes and saw nothing else as the world around us fell to ashes.

You wake up, and that's enough.

 

In the kitchen, Erwin is wearing a thick coat and protective goggles. We make do when we don’t have what we need.

Erwin is making soap.

Erwin also has a container filled with nitric acid on the counter and another labeled oleum.

A layer of something thick and clear is already starting to form in the top layer of the tallow he’s mixed.

He hands me one of the mixtures, says, “The clear layer is glycerin. You can mix that in when you start making the soap. Or you can wait and watch.”

Shouldn’t you be out there striking fear into the heart of the army you’ve built? Don’t take your eyes off the ball for chrissakes, I say, as Erwin scrubs residue off a tray, then fills it with ice cold water.

“Fear of me shouldn’t be the only thing keeping them in check – we’ll wait 10 minutes before we scrape that layer off and reuse it,” he says, opening the windows.

“What do you think they’d die for?” Erwin’s twisted mouth is an autopsy, a hidden wound, showing a cadaverically perfumed depth of humanity and dream. “For them violence is a means to an end, except that end is selfish, solipsistic. They would not fight for anything or anyone except themselves and what they think is owed to them.”

“They let go of everything except the desire to harm and think _yes, this is what being free feels like_.”

“But,” he says, taking my left hand in both of his, on the empty space of table between us, “ _but_ — if you can guide them, take their violence and fashion it into a gun, well, the cards will be stacked in your favor.”

Actually, I think, Erwin’s personal pack may comprise the full fifty-two, but it is crammed with jokers and wild cards, pipless deuces, three-eyed queens.

“This gun only has one bullet in it,” he continues fervently, simply incandescently severe, “but if you aim it right, you could blow a kneecap off the world.”

When he licks his lips wet and shining under the sole lightbulb hanging in a socket, little beads of condensation on the wires, on my temples and my lightly shaking hands, I can feel something bright and ravenous growing in me.

Erwin lifts my hand and kisses it slowly, reverently, like something made holy, his eyes hot as electrodes and never leaving mine.

“This will hurt more than anything you have ever experienced,” Mr. Smith says.

I tie the noose when the ringleaders are hanged.

“You’ll have a scar,” Mr. Smith says.

I pull away the stool. I break my own neck.

“Slowly pour glycerin into a mixture of nitric acid and oleum, tempered with cold water to keep it from igniting, and you can make nitroglycerin,” Mr. Smith says.

My roles are spit and spittoon knife and wound tooth and throat neck and rope.

“A day like today will stain your eyes and skin,” Mr. Smith says.

My vision goes white.

Fire breaks open my sealed up flesh.

I do not look down. I will not watch my blood boil, my tendons unspool.

“You know how soap was first made, don’t you?” Erwin says, calm, controlled, at the far end of a very long tunnel. “It was made from human ash slowly dissolved into rivers from burning pyres, and sacrifice, and death.”

My fingers will detach, then my hand at the wrist, and it will be over.

“You would have nothing without their sacrifice,” Erwin says, holding my arm down effortlessly, while I choke and scream and struggle.

I retreat into my intestines. I think of mechanical sheep flying through a sky of tungsten.

“Don’t,” Erwin hisses, “don’t hide from this. This is _real_. Open your eyes.”

I want to live in my veins, in the marrow of my bones, in the labyrinth of my skull.

“Somewhere bodies are opened so you can be alone with your blood,” Erwin says.

I take a seat in my blood. Under the sun of torture.

"This is the greatest moment of your life," says Erwin, voice a harsh bark, "and you're off somewhere else. You're missing it.”

I would say anything to make the pain stop. My voice is hoarse and pathetic, saying _please, no, no, no, I get it, I understand_ —

The cancerous, poisonous bonfire on my hand radiates like a sun.

When I look towards the sink, Erwin catches my gaze, digs his nails into my arm.

"You can go for the water," Erwin says, "you can, Levi, look at me, or you can use vinegar to neutralise the burn. But first you have to accept that this is real. That this is all there is. Your death has no other body than this."

Mine. All of it. Every last burning inch. You can’t take it away from me, my body, not anymore.

I felt MY blood draining from MY veins.

I manage to scream out, you don’t know what this feels like, Erwin.

He simultaneously raises his left eyebrow and his right hand.

On it there is a mark. A pair of lips immortalized, the skin around them redder than the rest.

"Really," says Erwin, and dumps the vinegar over my hand.

I fall to the floor, curled up tight around that pain-filled core.

It’s something to think we hold the future in our hands, that if we’re not careful rather than cradle it we will crush it.

 

The basement is starting to become too small for all the men that show up.

Now fight club night is every night.

“I’m seeing a lot of new faces here today and that only means one thing,” Erwin says, displeased.

“It means a lot of you have been breaking the first rule,” Erwin says.

“It means you haven’t been listening and in doing so you have endangered all of our work so far,” Erwin says.

“This is not about what you know, or what you think you know—” Erwin begins, but is cut off.

Three men descend into the basement, one of them, red in the face, a magnificent cross-breeding between protein and tin can.

Erwin stops, waits, hands at his sides.

“You there, smart guy, who the fuck are you?” says the boss.

“I’m Erwin,” Mr. Smith says, deceptively calm.

“And who the hell gave you motherfuckers permission to use my bar?” says the boss.

“You did,” Mr. Smith says, “we had a deal.”

“That’s off the table now,” says the boss, “unless you give me all the money you make here.”

“There is no money,” Mr. Smith says.

“Bull _shit_ ,” says the boss, “you’re not here for the pretty sights are ya. You all look like roadkill.”

“No, really,” Mr. Smith says, flat.

“Get your freak carnival the fuck out of my basement,” says the boss.

“I think you should join our club. I hear it’s very relaxing,” Mr. Smith says. It’s as if the other’s words don’t even register.

“You playing dumb with me, now? Feeling too warm with all those teeth in your mouth?” the boss says, moving up into Erwin’s face.

“I think it would do you a lot of good,” says Mr. Smith. I don’t know what he’s doing, why he’s not fighting back. I clench my fists in anticipation.

The boss punches Erwin in the stomach and he doubles over with a gasp.

“Do you hear me now?” the boss says, voice shrill.

“Not really, no,” Mr. Smith says, like he’s a million miles away.

The boss punches him again, kicks him.

“How about now?” says the boss.

Erwin pauses for effect, face scrunched up like he’s thinking, before saying, “I think I had it for a second, but then I lost it again.”

The boss begins hitting with all the strength in his stocky frame.

The basement echoes with the sound of flesh hitting blood hitting bone. The men are becoming more and more uneasy, rustling uncomfortably.

Mr. Smith lifts up a hand, barring us from interfering.

When the boss pulls back, he is wheezing and gasping more than Erwin is. He thinks he’s won.

“You don’t understand,” Erwin says, teeth showing, “we need this place. You can’t take it away.”

We could find countless other places in less than two hours. There’s no need for this. Right now the floor’s seen more of Erwin’s blood than his own insides.

I blink and Mr. Smith is no longer kneeling on the floor. Their eyes were not watching him.

His kinder, gentler, machine gun hands are smearing bloody prints on the boss’ shirt as he drags himself up to his level and over it, towering.

In one smooth movement, he pushes the boss down, straddles him on the floor.

His face is a river, pouring into the boss’ eyes nose face.

Erwin laughs. It’s an intense and gorgeous sound; it renders me hollow, renders a gap in my arteries.

“Fuck,” the boss is saying, over and over, “get the fuck off me.”

His bodyguards try to drag Erwin away but he won’t give.

"You don't know where I've been," he says, voice low and triumphant, "you don't know where I've been."

“Fuckin’ hell,” says the boss, “you can keep the damn place, just let go of me.”

Mr. Smith relents. Those hands of his like a vice, his mouth a sewer.

They almost run out of the building.

Erwin laughs again, rich tangle of thorns. He didn’t even have to lay a single punch.

You don’t know him. You aren’t even capable.

He moves unaided to one of the crates in the corner, though it must hurt like hell.

“This week, you have homework,” he says.

“You are to go out and pick a fight with a random stranger,” he says.

“You are going to lose,” he says.

When the men scatter I approach him, hand him a cloth to wipe the blood away.

It’s a waste, truly. I would rather smear it on the columns of every temple, for him.

His smile is a clever, dangerous thing, like it’s seen what’s on the inside of my ribs, teeth shining a deep dark red.

I wonder what grave sin I have committed to ever deserve him.

 

There’s a word for the way Erwin moves through the world. For the way he thinks and plans, the black spot bearing down just outside the corner of your eye, but never his.

He weaves threads but you never see the full pattern until it’s finished. Until it’s too late.

Spiderlike. That’s the one.

His decreed missions are growing in scope and complexity. I can’t help but think, when I look at him, the razor of his brow and the trigger pulling just behind his mouth, of how men thrice lesser have toppled empires and started religions.

Of how I found him because finding him is all there was.

Of how I love him regardless of his deadly habits, because nothing he could ever do would make me love him less.

Of how we practiced shooting behind the warehouse, his hands over mine. (wound over wound; killer’s hands over killer’s hands)

Trigger here, beneath my fearless fingers. Safety off, clicking beneath his grip, as steady as a surgeon.

Our greatest moment: this, chorused by the blare of alarms from this city and the rest of the decrepit metropolises littering this particular landfill on the side of the globe.

Fight club is mine and Erwin’s gift.

Our gift to the world.

 

I come home and some of the men from fight club are sitting in the living room watching television.

I have no idea how they got that to work in this place.

I don’t understand why they’re even here.

When I try to detour through the kitchen I find Erwin there, as if he were waiting for me.

His eyes light up when he sees me. His pupils dilate. I swallow.

I open my mouth to speak, but he gets there first.

When he kisses me, hands set firmly on my shoulder, slow, filthy and sharp, like I always knew it was gonna be, I freeze.

He steps back. He gives me a bottle of something good and contagious. Our work is not yet done.

I check to see if anyone had the bad luck of stepping into the room with us. 

None such.

I don’t know what’s gotten into him that he would risk this now.

"We're celebrating," he says, simply, as if he were reading my mind.

Ah.

Back in the living room, on the TV screen, the Statue of Liberty is tonight’s star.

Around her temples a crown of entrails had been curled.

The men are cheering.

Everything is surreal.

Behind me, Erwin smiles.

 

A pack of rich rats are wetting themselves at the chance of a revenge spree. For all the money Erwin’s conned out of them, I suppose. They’re short sighted like that.

Erwin doesn’t like this. Erwin doesn’t like this at all.

Turns out their battle formation is nothing short of byzantine.

Frank is the leader; owns the hotel that acts as a front for his money laundering services. His daughter is married to the nephew of Phil, a man too toxic to feed to the vultures, whose deep running relations means transport, security and palm greasing are his domains. John, as his name suggests, is the boring fuck who forges cheques and documents, and probably holds Frank’s hand when he has to yell at his employees.

Add a ghost firm, philanthropist relatives who donate large sums of money to certain bank accounts, two generations worth of interfamily screw ups (sometimes literally, maybe) and I can see a few of our men start to go cross eyed.

Erwin is ten minutes into his rousing and blisteringly informative speech when I decide to speed things up a little.

Okay so, from my perfectly astute observations, I say, glibly, I believe what this all means is that John has his tongue so far up Frank’s asshole he’s french kissing Phil on the other side, and our civic duty right now is to bend down, grab any weapon we can, _especially_ crowbars, and brain them a good one.

Some guy in the back wolf-whistles.

“You truly are the People’s Poet, Levi,” Erwin says, faking a long-suffering sigh, but not so secretly loving when I have my way with words.

I’m a man with a plan, I say, pulling on my boots and the rest of my sidewalk-scraping kit. Kill ‘em all, let God sort ‘em out.

We break into Frank’s house in the middle of the night.

The wrong end of Erwin’s .44 presses into the dome of his head.

“You have to understand, this isn’t personal, except for the way that it is,” he is saying, so cold, but so right. “Sometimes, the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at the heart, that you cannot bring yourself to take part, not anymore.”

Frank’s house staff is in on this. It’s why we were able to get in without alerting the cops.

“And this is where you have a duty, to put your body on the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, use it to grind the machine to a halt.” When Erwin’s steady cadence reaches the word grind, his hand closes around Frank’s throat.

Frank, the lousy, brave, shit-for-brains, grins and spits him in the eye. “What the fuck is this, you reading me the Riot Act now? You’re a fuckin’ joke, is what you are.”

Erwin grimaces like this is all boring him terribly. He knows how it will end, but by some awful convention he is forced to play his part and say his lines. 

He plucks the worm’s hideous thousand dollar suit off the floor and wipes his face with it, throws it halfway across the room like rags.

“This,” he says, caustic, “is human sacrifice. And you’re the chosen one.”

He clicks the safety off. You don’t really have to do that, but it’s good for effect.

“I will burn this place down around your fuckin’ ears,” says Erwin, and Frank goes white.

"We do your laundry. Cook your food. Serve you dinner. We guard you while you sleep. We drive your ambulances. Do not fuck with us," Erwin says.

When he pulls the trigger, Frank has reached the bargaining and crying stage.

The gun does nothing but click.

Neat old trick, that.

“This gun isn’t loaded,” Erwin says, then nodding at me, “but that one is.”

I take aim; trajectory: straight through the heart. Holy, he might call it.

My eyes never leave Erwin’s silhouette. He is wearing your worst nightmare’s smile, delineated through the venetian blinds.

Looking at that man all wretched on the floor, I only hear the thunder of hooves and the falling of bodies in my ears for a second— but, it’s a very long second. An eternity, if you like.

I wonder if this is what the inside of Erwin’s mind is like.

"Good night, sir," Erwin says.

When we climb into our getaway car, I take a liking to the fire-apple red convertible we took from Frank’s collection (we’re vain assholes like that), and a dislike to the way the driver’s eyes move over Erwin’s body as he slides next to me into the backseat.

I’ve seen him before.

The angular face.

The too-big eyes.

The cleverness, but it's never enough.

The guys call him Angelface.

As the car purrs into life, Erwin lays his hand on his shoulder, says, “You did a fine job.”

I begin to feel my skin itch, my thoughts unravel.

 

The next night, fight club night, Angelface is mine.

I break his nose.

I knock his teeth down his throat so hard he almost chokes on them.

I break his ribs.

I want to breathe smoke.

I want to break humanity in two and live in the empty middle.

Long live hate, contempt, rebellion, death.

When I come back to myself, I realize everyone else was too scared to intervene.

There might be a whole layer of blood on my face that does not belong to me.

The men go to the kid’s side only after I’ve walked away.

“Where did you go to, you psycho?” says Erwin.

I felt like destroying something beautiful, I say.

Not that he would ever compare to you, I don’t say.

 

The house has the strange property of making you think you’re the last survivor in the world.

It’s too quiet. Eerie.

When I pad to my room, yearning for shapeless things beyond sleep, Erwin stops me.

"Wait," he says. “Follow me.”

He takes me to his room, crowds me up against the wall.

There’s nothing beyond the door’s threshold except night. Outside the window nothing is apparent except the light from inside here, reflected through a prism, again and again.

A chamber for two in the middle of a void.

Nothing is real except what is in this room.

What, I say.

"You want this," he says. It is not a question.

When he kisses me I become lost in the very satisfying violence of him.

I am harder than I have ever been in my life.

Each time the same — the bed a single long table, and I laid down upon it, finding glory in every gash of nails, a shrine in every bite. His thighs of nostalgia, the line of his spine a slick highway down to his sacrum — he makes me conscious of my bones, desire down to the marrow.

His teeth move up from my neck. My blood drips from his mouth and into mine, and yes, I do believe in transubstantiation; he eats me up, thorns an’ all, and I will awake someday inside his veins, pound my fists against the walls of him.

Erwin drinks deep of me with our knees open, and I admire the oil on his chin under the messy light.

He pushes and pulls, drifts like he is in another plane of reality altogether before crashing back into me, before we dissolve into each other with a mutual smile.

He is the searing beauty of the atom bomb. One comet for the end. The light of highways and the badlands on fire.

Erwin leaves bruises on my thighs. Erwin pulls out my hair. Erwin splits my lip.

Erwin loves me so sweet I shiver.

This is ours, elevated no higher. This belongs to me, as I forget what shame feels like.

Erwin’s eyes are closed, the luminous look still on his face. When I reach up I can taste the word _God_ on his lips.

I come so hard I black out.

I can feel him brush his hand over my hair, strands catching.

He kisses my temple but I can’t quite make out what he says before everything goes black.

 

The next morning when I wake up, my cheek is pressed to the ragged fibers of the rug.

Alone, of course, with a mouth as dry as the carpet. The light is still on above me, blinking.

I rest my head against the side of the bed, a thousand nails prickling behind my eyelids.

It looks to be an earthquake kind of morning.

Downstairs, the men from fight club have crawled in like stray cats.

Erwin is nowhere to be seen.

The first rule of Project Mayhem is that you do not ask questions, sir.

I am Levi’s blood running cold.

I believe we are all running out of time.

I know this because Erwin knows this.

 

I take all the money we’ve hidden in the house.

I take my passport and the keys to that forgotten car.

I think about burning this place to the ground, but the men downstairs are chanting. Any second I stay here is one second too many.

When I step outside, Hange is leaning against their car. Waiting for me, apparently.

“Long time, no see,” they say, sunlight glinting off their glasses. “Need a lift?”

No, I say, fingers twitching. There’s something I need to do. Alone.

“Is your friend back yet?” they say. It’s like they never heard me.

He’s not here anymore. He’s gone, I say, something tugging at my voice.

“What?” says Hange. There is an edge to their tone I’ve never heard before.

Mr. Smith isn’t here anymore, I say, Mr. Smith’s gone away.

Hange stares at me. They don’t say anything for a long time.

They blink; shake their head. “Whatever this is about, Levi, I’m sure we can fix it. It’s not over yet. Come on in and we can talk about this.”

There’s nothing to talk about, I say, frantic. I need to find him and set things right.

“Levi, please, you’re—”

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, I’m Doctor Jekyll and Mister Jackass, now listen to me. I need you to drive out of here and never look back. Don’t contact me again. In fact, it’s best if you forgot about me altogether.

I think of the chanting coming from the house and pray to everything I don’t believe in that they will listen. Hange must sense it too because they nod almost imperceptibly.

I watch them drive off before I start running.

 

I walk in Erwin’s footsteps, and follow a road map that exists only in my head.

This is the part where I wander through the desert, battle three headed lions, and emerge a changed man.

I have to find him because finding him is all there is.

I wake up in Chicago.

I wake up in LA.

I wake up in New Orleans.

I walk into bars and I can tell exactly which one hosts a fight club. I don’t know why that is.

People stare at me wherever I go. They nod respectfully and step back as I pass them.

I can see the wrong kind of light filling their eyes.

It’s strange. I’ve never been to these places, but I hear them saying, “Welcome back”. I recognize names, faces, the scars on the back of their right hands.

A man’s voice saying, “How can I help you, Mr. Smith?”

I am Jack's weakening grip on reality.

I find Erwin on top of the Empire State Building.

Project Mayhem has planted bombs in key locations all around the country.

I grab his collar, scream into his face. Betrayal is an insidious poison.

You did this to me! You’re not even real, I say, you’re a voice inside my head.

“Jury’s still out on that,” Erwin says, “maybe you’re a voice inside mine.”

I fall to my knees with a sob. I feel small, defeated.

I don’t want to kill anymore. I don’t want to die anymore.

Suddenly, his arms are around me, and I lean into him, blind with salt and neon. He is speaking, deciphering the cellular discrepancies that mean I have seen the world flayed open.

“This is not the first time I have said this, but you have not listened — time and time again have not listened. But that does not matter. Men’s memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not. Know this: I have looked at you and saw you were enough.”

Muffled against Erwin’s shoulder, against coat and skin, I can no longer tell where speaking begins, where thinking ends.

_You will always know you are living. You will guard your life with everything you have._

_And what’s that?_

_A gun, your mind, and me. You’ll never lose me._

He clasps my face in his hands and I look at him. Further off, and I can see his words seared into the lit map of the city skyline, brighter, then, than the sign of the bar or the flare of the TV screens, brighter, then, than anything.

We have to finish this, now, I say. You have a cold cold smile.

The wind up here sounds like music.

When I think of Erwin I think of an artifact, like it was something designed to stick in your chest and leave you spread open, sore. In a sick, beautiful, everlasting way, looking at him always stings a little.

When his lips part, no puff of breath fogs the air between us.

I lift myself up, resisting him. I can hear sirens blaring in the distance.

Oh, Hange, God bless you.

“I don’t want to do this, Levi,” says Erwin.

Are you even alive? I say.

“Come find out,” he says. We both go for the neck.

I think this is about where we came in.

 

As we fell through artificial light and through shade, turning in that lonely void, I thought of how it would absolve us of memory in the mind of any living thing there was.

We are this much closer to cracking our heads on the pavement.

Time stops. Time spits in your eye and grins.

We land. I am wide awake.

Snow. Ice age.

 

When I wake up I am in heaven.

 _In heaven everything is fine_ , I hear, distant, like a song coming on the radio in another room.

God in his white lab coat beside my bed looks down on me, tugging at his long white beard.

"Mr. Smith?" he reads and looks up. "Mr. Levi Smith?"

Yes, I say, my voice sounding strange in my ears. That's me.

The sound echoes in the room, more tangible than I feel.

I can do anything now. But, most of all: live.

I can live in a world built fresh in his image, sharp and purposeful and never to be dulled again.

The future looks like him, and he is shining.

**Author's Note:**

> I struggled with how to write the trigger warnings for this piece, as most of what warrants them goes deep enough to be felt at different points in the narrative. The violence is indicative of both the individual and the system that birthed him, same for the mental health issues. I did not want to make a spectacle of them, nor cut down their importance; as someone who also deals with PTSD and occasional lack of self-preservation instincts, I know what a heavy subject it can be.
> 
> The suicidal ideation overtone is present in the book as well (it was glossed over in the film), as Levi struggles to find a palpable version of _I am okay ___in a world that would rather see him dead, or otherwise removed. There are hints of internalised resentment about his same-sex attraction, and you can see the building blocks of the wall that he built to keep himself safe, but I wanted this to be a story where he resists his instinct to violence and levels out in the end.
> 
> Erwin, being in his own way a sort of anti-Tyler Durden, embodies an angel-devil antithesis, where he ultimately struggles to help Levi, but not in a way that is particularly healthy or kind. He guides Levi through the inferno and will see him through to the other side even if he has to use despicable methods to do so. They do love each other, in a twisted, labyrinthine way, as only a tenuous dance of affection between two dangerous and deeply fucked up people can be. I intentionally left his existence ambiguous and not as clear cut as in the book.
> 
> I don't really know if this makes sense, or if I achieved what I set out to do, but I wrote the version of Fight Club that is closest to me, one that I hope carries some sort of resonance. I enjoy reading about people clawing their way to steady ground, however ugly and misshapen that road may be. I do not condone what the characters have done, but their struggles are not singular to them alone. I wish you all safety, strength and solidarity so that you may find your own way out of the dark.


End file.
